Anne's Orange 2012

Well, this year I went a little Orange crazy and read 19 Orange titles. I also went a little crazy collecting Orange books (thank you Borders going-out-of-business sales), so despite all that reading there are even more unread on my shelves than when I started.

For 2012, I plan to read 12 Orange books, roughly one each month. I have a whole category in my 12 in 12 challenge just for Orange reading.

I am steadily working through the winners, and this year hope to get to A Spell of Winter, Home, The Road Home, and Fugitive Pieces, along with whatever the 2012 winner is.

I also aim to read as many books off the 2012 longlist as I can, because I had so much fun doing that in 2011.

For Orange January I will start with A Spell of Winter, Girl in a Blue Dress, and The Road Home.

Read in 2012
Orange January
Fall On Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald (1997 Longlist) 5 stars
A Spell of Winter - Helen Dunmore (1996 Winner) 3.8 stars
Property 4.2

The Night Circus 4.8 stars
Lord of Misrule 4.5
Foreign Bodies 3.7
Gillespie and I 4.4
The Song of Achilles 4.8
Painter of Silence 4.7
Half Blood Blues 4.0
Translation of the Bones 4.3
The Forgotten Waltz 4.2
State of Wonder 4.2
Old Filth 4.7
There but for the 4.3
The Hundred Secret Senses 3.7
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers 3.7

Read in 2011

White Teeth (2000 Shortlist) (4 stars) and
The Lacuna (2010 Winner) (5 stars)
A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011 longlist) 4.5 stars
Paradise - Toni Morrison (1999 shortlist) 4.5 stars
Case Histories - Kate Atkinson (2005 longlist) 4.5 stars
Room - Emma Donoghue (2011 shortlist) 4.5 stars
The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht (2011 winner) 4.5 stars
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson (2006 longlist) 4 stars
Small Island - Andrea Levy (2004 winner) 5 stars
The Memory of Love - Aminatta Forna (2011 shortlist) 5 stars
Great House - Nicole Krauss (2011 shortlist) 4 stars
Digging to America - Anne Tyler (2007 shortlist) 4 stars
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives - Lola Shoneyin (2011 longlist) 4 stars
Grace Williams Says it Loud - Emma Henderson (2011 shortlist) 4 stars
Annabel – Kathleen Winter (2011 shortlist) 4 stars
The Outcast – Sadie Jones 4 stars
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 4.5 stars
Swamplandia! – Karen Russell (2011 longlist) 4 stars
A Mercy – Toni Morrison 4 stars

2010
The Help (2010 Longlist) 4.5 stars
Wolf Hall (2010 Shortlist) 5 stars
Burnt Shadows (2009 Shortlist) 4 stars
A Gate At the Stairs (2010 Shortlist) 3.5 stars

before 2010
Bel Canto (2002 Winner) 4.5 stars
The Poisonwood Bible (1999 Shortlist) 5 stars
The Ventriloquist's Tale (1998 Shortlist) 3 stars
Accordion Crimes (1997 Shortlist) 4 stars
Ladder of Years (1996 Shortlist) (liked it, but can't remember how much)
Girl With a Pearl Earring (2000 Longlist) 4 stars
Charming Billy (2000 Longlist) 4 stars
The Gathering (2008 Longlist) 3.5 stars
The Namesake (2004 Longlist) 4 stars
The Lovely Bones (2003 Longlist) 4.5 stars
Five Quarters of the Orange (2002 Longlist) 4.5 stars
La Cucina (2002 Longlist) (can't remember)
The Secret Life of Bees (2002 Longlist) 4.5 stars
Ahab's Wife (2001 Longlist) 4 stars
The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001 Longlist) 4 stars

On the shelves, I have:
The Long Song - Andrea Levy (2010 Longlist)
The Girls - Lori Lansens (2007 Longlist)
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (2004 Longlist)
The Road Home - Rose Tremain
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
The White Family - Maggie Gee
Unless - Carol Shields
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
The Lost Dog - Michele de Kreutzer
The Seas - Samantha Hunt
The London Train - Tessa Hadley
The Invention of Everything Else - Samantha Hunt
The Invisible Bridge - Julie Orringer
Caramelo - Sandra Cisneros
Liars and Saints - Maile Meloy
The Wilderness - Samantha Harvey
Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Larry’s Party - Carol Shields
The Flying Troutmans - Miriam Toews
What Was Lost - Catherine O'Flynn
✔A Spell of Winter - Helen Dunmore
Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller
Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
✔ A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Girl in a Blue Dress - Gaynor Arnold

Orange Wishlist

Sorry - Gail Jones
The Siege - Helen Dunmore
Ice Road - Gillian Slovo
February - Lisa Moore
Home - Marilynne Robinson
✔Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie McDonald
The Septembers of Shiraz
The Keep - Jennifer Egan
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace - Margarat Atwood
Lullabies for Little Criminals - Heather O'Neill
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
Black and Blue - Anna Quindlen
✔The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan

Welcome, Anne! I still need to get my hands on A Spell of Winter; I've heard so many good things! Hope you enjoy it!

Wow, you have a lot of great books to choose from Anne. Welcome to the group.

Hi Anne - Great lists! I love lists! I am impressed with your 2011 Orange reading.... well done! From your on the shelves list I have only read The Time Traveler's wife, Unless and The Flying Troutmans each uniquely different and ones that I enjoyed. I hope to read Orange all year as well and will be following your Orange reading here and on the 12 in 12! Happy Orange reading!

Anne, an impressive list and impressive organization, I need to get busy as I have no idea exactly where I stand with the Oranges, although I am starting the year with The Night Watch by Sarah Waters.

Chiming in with a welcome, and admiring your lists.
I've read The Road Home, Fugitive Pieces and Girl in a Blue Dress, I think you're in for a treat with each. All are special in their own way.

Happy reading :)

Hi Anne, I do have to say that Sorry has a deserved place on your wishlist! I hope you find a copy.

Why not read Oranges all year: great idea! For your January reads, I've only read Rose Tremain's novel. It took me a long time to get "into" it, but then I suddenly realized that I was far more invested in the lives of the characters than I had realized. It ended up on my favourites list for that year. Hope you enjoy it too!

Hi Anne! Finally finding some post holiday time to say Hi!! Great list! Of your possible January reads, I can vouch for Long Song by Andrea Levy - love it! Personally, I'm enjoying The Siege by Helen Dunmore! Oh! That's on your to be read possibly list! ;)
Happy New year!

So many visitors since I was last here!

Jill, A Spell of Winter will be my next book, right after I finish Fall On Your Knees which just cut to the front of the line.

Thanks Laura.

Lori--I love lists too--can you tell?

Michelle, I saw your review of The Night Watch and plan to move that up on my list. It would fit nicely into a category I have for "books set in London" and I loved your review.

KimB I'm glad you enjoyed those books. I hope I actually get to them all!

Tania, I've heard nothing but good things about Sorry and although I don't have that one it looks like it would be worth getting my hands on. The library, maybe.

buriedinprint, I like reading Oranges whenever. Thanks for the endorsement of The Road Home, it's been on my list for a while.

Deb, The Siege is on my list for later in the year, but probably not January. (I am however reading another Helen Dunmore book). I'm glad you're enjoying it.

My Orange January plans have shifted a little as I am now in the middle of Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald and I absolutely can't put it down. I've had this book checked out from the library since probably October, but the library mysteriously has no record of my checking it out, which I think means I won't get a fine when I return it. It also means I can't renew it, and since it has no due date, I wasn't feeling much pressure to read it. But once I finally picked it up, it completely sucked me in.

Hi AnneDC, I'm reading A Spell of Winter now and finding it quite interesting. It started out good and now has twisted and turned so I'm really wondering where it's going next! I'll be interested to see what you think of it as well.

I'm also thinking I should add Fall On Your Knees as I'm seeing so many positive comments about it.

Tee Hee. Want to talk about *FoyK* when you finish it?
I do love The Road Home, and hope you get back to it soon.

13 Oh yes Peggy, I would love to discuss. I should finish tonight or tomorrow, depending on how much reading time I get tonight. (Right now I am in the middle of Kathleen's diary.)

Well, I've finished two Orange books, and that may be it for Orange January, though if I have time I will try to read Property, another one that wasn't in my original January plan.

Fall On Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald (1997 Longlist)

Rating: 5 stars

I loved this book, and I don’t hand out 5 stars often. It had everything I appreciate in a book: beautiful writing, a perfectly rendered setting, unforgettable characters, and a storyline that kept me turning pages right up to the last page, and then going back to revisit sections and images.

Although my copy of Fall On Your Knees is over 500 pages long, I never would have called this a long book. I read other books this month that though shorter, felt much longer.

The setting is Cape Breton Island, off Nova Scotia, just before World War I. James Piper, whose mother had taught him “to read the classics, to play piano and to expect something finer in spite of everything,” moves to Sydney, the only city on the island, to try his luck tuning pianos for a living. He falls in love with Materia Mahmoud, the twelve (yes, twelve) year old daughter of a Lebanese family whose piano he tunes. They run off and get married, and are disowned by her large and prosperous family. Mrs. Mahmoud, who reads fortunes in tea leaves, feels both sorrow and “a chill. For she had seen something in his cup.”

Bad things happen to the Piper family and the four Piper sisters, Kathleen, Mercedes, Frances and Lily. In fact, very bad things. It is a grim family saga laced with dark humor. But although this is a story about damage, it is also about resilience and love.

Breathtaking writing:

The night is bright with the moon. Look down over Water Street. On the lonely stretch between where the houses end and where the sea bites into the land, a tree casts a network of shadow that stirs and bloats in one spot, as though putting forth dark fruit that droops, then drops from the bough. It’s a figure come out from under the branches and onto the street. It stops, drifting in place like a plant on the ocean floor. Then it travels again all the way down the street to the graveyard.

Humor:

Lily’s foot is bleeding. She doesn’t know it, because the bagpipes are drowning out the pain. This is what bagpipes are designed to do.

A sense of place:

Mrs. Luvovitz looks at the sea and thinks, when did this become my home? When I buried Benny here? When the second war came? She cannot discern the moment. She just knows that every time she returns to Cape Breton, she feels in her bones, this is my home. That is why she has declined to move permanently to Montreal. She spends half the year there. She loves her daughter-in-law, would you believe? And her five grandchildren who are only each perfect. They speak French at home, English at school and Yiddish with every second shopkeeper. Real Canadians.

One more thing about this book that spoke to me in a personal way: The Mahmouds are Catholic, and the Piper children are raised Catholic, so elements of Catholicism permeate the novel. It is a Catholicism of childhood—rosaries and guardian angels and purgatory and penance and Saint Bernadette--and it felt comfortingly familiar to me, taking me straight back to my own childhood.

A Spell of Winter – Helen Dunmore. (1996 Winner)

Rating 3.8

It is always tough to move on from a 5 star read, so I might have loved this book more at another time, still, it was very good, and made me want to read more from Helen Dunmore.

First sentence: "I saw an arm fall off a man once," said Kate.

In an old house that is slowly but surely crumbling to ruin around them, Cathy and her older brother Rob live virtually unattended except by Kate, the young Irish servant who is both caretaker and companion. Lurking in the background are Miss Gallagher, Cathy's former teacher who is sinisterly obsessed with Cathy and dislikes Rob, and their remote and slightly frightening grandfather. Their mother has gone away, and their father is in an institution--both absences have an aura of mystery around them. Cathy and Rob are very close--I'll just leave it at that--and a series of increasingly disturbing things happen. Everything in this novel is presented from Cathy's point of view, and it shifts in time from the present to various memories from her childhood. As readers, I don't think we ever see anything more than what Cathy herself sees and understands in a given scene.

Dunmore beautifully captures details of the seasons, the decay of the house (and family), a former prosperity reduced to barely surviving, the impact of wartime privation on the countryside. The strength of this novel is definitely in atmosphere rather than storyline. Although it came to a satisfying conclusion (for me), I found too many questions left unanswered along the way.

>12 Neverwithoutabook: neverwithoutabook, I hope you continued to enjoy A Spell of Winter. I have to say some of those twists and turns really threw me for a loop, but what a beautifully written story.

Need to put Fall on your Knees on my wishlist!

>16 AnneDC: - AnneDC - Yes, I did enjoy A Spell of Winter. It wasn't my usual type of read, but as you say...the twists and turns....kept me reading. I found myself wishing for more in the end. What happens next? It was an appropriate ending, but I'm snoopy, and I wanted to know how Cathy and her mother got on now. :)

I thought I should catch up on my Orange thread, even though it's neither January not June, since I have been reading a lot from this year's longlist. I hope to have the shortlist finished by the time this year's winner is announced!

*******

The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern

Rating: 4.5

I’d seen a lot of glowing reviews here on LT and so requested this one for Christmas, but my Christmas haul was quite a big one and so I’ve got many to choose from. I moved this to the top of the pile when my sister sent me an urgent email saying "read this now."

For lack of a better word: Magical. In several senses. First, The Night Circus is about magic, and second the way the author conjures up the multisensory world of the “Circus of Dreams” felt magical. I don’t want to say too much about it or even think too much about it—I am afraid that it might not stand up to intense scrutiny, like a soap bubble, but I loved it. I read it more or less in one sitting and finished it really wanting the circus Morgenstern created to be real. The novel’s strong point is atmosphere—though the storyline kept me turning pages, and the characters are interesting and original though maybe not deep. Some specific things I liked were the presence of magic in an otherwise realistic historical setting, and also an underlying darkness that served as a counterpoint to the caramel and cinnamon-tinged dreaminess. An amazing first novel.

Sound bites:

The circus looks abandoned and empty. But you think perhaps you can smell caramel wafting through the evening breeze, beneath the crisp scent of the autumn leaves. A subtle sweetness at the edges of the cold.

and

The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey. And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets and tiny books with actual paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon that curls around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in distress, awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that pour into teacups and miniscule curls of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played.

At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern.

and

"Secrets have power," Widget begins. "And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them."

Lord of Misrule – Jaimy Gordon

Rating: 4.5

This was a surprise hit for me, one which I’d avoided reading even after it won the National Book Award because the horse-racing subject had so little appeal for me. It is a testament to the author’s way with words that I found myself completely drawn into this story about a bunch of down-and-out characters (and I do mean characters) at a third-rate racetrack in the West Virginia panhandle, and I could not put it down.

I found it a little bit reminiscent of Steinbeck in the author’s obvious affection for the seedy inhabitants of her world.

I’ve seen complaints about the lack of quotation marks, and while that might have bothered me, I started out with this book in audio format, where quotation marks are irrelevant, and the narrator (Myra Lucretia Taylor) was just right. Midway through I picked up a hard copy because I wanted to be able to appreciate the language more.

Here is Medicine Ed, the veteran groom, on the first page, describing the hotwalking machine at the track:

Right down to the sore horses at each point of the silver star, it resembled some woebegone carnival ride, some skeleton of a two-bit ride dreamed up by a dreamer too tired to dream. There’s been no rain all August and by now the fresh worked horses were half lost in the pink cloud of their own shuffling. Red dust from those West Virginia hills rode in their wide open nostrils and stuck to their squeezebox lungs.

Tommy Hansel, horseman with a plan:

Luck was the same. It came because you called to it, whistled for it, because it saw you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Luck was the world leaping into your arms across a deep ditch and long odds. It was love, which is never deserved; all the rest was drudgery.

Maggie:

For all her stamina, as a human girl she knew she was lazy and unambitious, except for this one thing: She could find her way to the boundary where she ended and some other strain of living creature began. On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren’t supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home.

Foreign Bodies - Cynthia Ozick

Rating: 3.5

Foreign Bodies was reportedly intended as an homage to Henry James and patterned on his novel The Ambassadors.

I have never read anything else by Cynthia Ozick, and have not read The Ambassadors so my immediate comparison is to other Orange longlisted books—I read this simultaneously with Lord of Misrule, after The Night Circus, and before Song of Achilles—all of which were extraordinary reads for me. So it may not be the book's fault that I feel so lukewarm about it.

Bea Nightingale, a middle-aged teacher divorced and living in New York, is contacted by her distant and imperious brother (whom she dislikes, and how could one not?) and commanded to spend part of her European vacation trying to track down her nephew Julian (whom she has never met) who has overstayed his junior year abroad by a few years and shows no signs of returning home to finish his degree, to his father’s annoyance. For reasons unclear she agrees to this “ambassador” role and becomes increasingly enmeshed in the dysfunction of her brother’s family.

I enjoyed reading this while I was reading it—it is relatively short, well-written and briskly paced, and held my attention throughout.

Not a single character is really likable, which is not always an obstacle to liking a book for me, but something about this one left me cold by the end. I feel like there is some structural effect the author was trying to accomplish that I missed by not knowing The Ambassadors, but I’m not sure appreciating that would have made me warm to the book more. And I don’t think Ozick was going for warmth, in any case.

I did really like Ozick’s set-up and her portrayal of postwar Paris—which is not James’ Paris, nor that of Hemingway.

Describing two types of foreigners in Paris:

The first was looking to summon the past: it was a kind of self-intoxicated theater. They were mostly young Americans in their twenties and thirties who call themselves “expatriates,” though they were little more than literary tourists on a long visit, besotted with legends of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
...
The other foreign contingent—the ghosts—were polyglot. They chattered in dozens of languages. Out of their mouths spilled all the cadences of Europe. Unlike the Americans, they shunned the past, and were free of any taint of nostalgia or folklore or idyllic renewal. They were Europeans whom Europe had set upon; they wore Europe’s tattoo.

And of Bea herself:
she was one of that ludicrously recognizable breed of middle-aged teachers who save up for a longed-for summer vacation in the more romantic capitals of Europe. That these capitals, after the war, were scarred and exhausted, drained of all their well-advertised enchantments, did not escape her.


It figures that the one I liked least so far ended up on the shortlist!

Gillespie and I - Jane Harris

Rating: 4.4

Gillespie and I opens in 1933 as the unforgettable narrator Harriet Baxter informs us of her intent to tell the story of Ned Gillespie, a little-known painter from Glasgow. Here is the book's opening, from the Preface:

It would appear that I am to be the first to write a book on Gillespie. Who, if not me, was dealt that hand? Indeed, one might say, who else is left to tell the tale? Ned Gillespie: artist, innovator, and forgotten genius; my dear friend and soul mate.

The story alternates between Harriet's present, a solitary existence in London, and past, when she relocates to Glasgow for the 1888 Glasgow International Exhibition. There, she establishes a friendship with Gillespie and his family, and disturbing events transpire.

This is not a book that it is a good idea to know too much about in advance. Think of it as brilliantly written historical fiction with a mysterious crime thrown in. Gillespie and I is a cleverly told tale that may have you wanting to start all over when you get to the end.

The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

Rating: 4.8

I snapped this up on my Kindle after reading a couple of glowing reviews and read it while I was on vacation in early April. I can’t say I read it in one sitting, but if I could have, I would have. At one point I recall sitting down in a chair next to my sister and saying “sorry to be rude, but my book is so good!”

Song of Achilles is a debut novel, ten years in the writing (which makes me nervous because I hope it doesn’t take ten years for her to write another!) Miller takes a well-known story—The Iliad--and imbues it with life.

The writing is beautifully descriptive, real characters come to life out of Greek mythology, feeling ancient yet contemporary. Miller has somehow written a page-turner despite the fact that the plot is widely, even universally, known. While her treatment feels fresh, it feels authentic too.

Now I find myself inspired to reread Greek and Roman classics I haven’t thought about since I was in school.

Painter of Silence – Georgina Harding

Rating: 4.7

Painter of Silence is set in Romania before, during, and after World War II. It opens in a gray Communist city in the fifties, where a very sick man has traveled by train from the countryside in search of someone, and collapses on the steps of the hospital. When he starts to get better, he is discovered to be deaf and mute. Safta, a nurse, brings him drawing materials to help him communicate—as it turns out, not by accident. Although she never tells anyone, she knows this man well—he is part of a past which she has kept hidden because it would reveal her privileged class upbringing.

The two main characters are Safta, the daughter of wealthy landowners, now a nurse in a city hospital, and Augustin (Tinu), the illegitimate son of the family cook. Augustin is deaf and mute but has a remarkable gift for painting. The two were born six months apart, and share a complicated bond.

The story alternates between the present, where Safta and another nurse restore Augustin to health, and the past, which is evoked through Safta’s memories and Augustin’s efforts to communicate to her the things that have happened since she left her home. One picture that emerges is the collapse of the prewar social order and the disappearance of a way of life, and Harding “paints” this world with a beautiful nostalgic quality, that almost makes me think of Tolstoy. (there is even a mushroom party and a brief threshing reference.)

I really loved this book. I loved the quiet, elegant flow of Harding’s language. I loved the book for making real for me a historical time and place which I’ll confess was pretty fuzzy—Romania in the 30’s. And I loved the distinctly original perspective on the horrors of war in the form of Augustin, a careful observer with no access to language. His efforts to depict the events of war as he experienced them give a new twist to the term “senseless.” A sweet ending provides relief from what might otherwise be a story of relentless bleakness--though some might find it contrived.

You've enjoyed so many of the Orange books from this year's list!

The only one I"ve read so far of these, is Gillespie and I. I agree that knowing little before starting is probably the best. I've got Song of Achilles to read soon, and I'm off to pick up The Forgotten Waltz from the library.

Great updates!

FANTASTIC reviews!!

#19 - I agree wholeheartedly with your review on this one. I loved this book (The Night Circus)!!!!

#23 - I am reading The Song of Achilles now and would just like life to stop so I can finish, please!! :) I love it so far.

You make me want to read some of the others I wasn't previously interested in. Hmmmmm... need more hours in the day.